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The aim of this paper is to examine the concept of ‘in-betweenness’ as a potential frame of reference for Zoë Wicomb’s writing, particularly her latest novel . Hence, my primary intent is to focus on the novelist as equipped with a faculty for crossing over separate cultural traditions and embracing different formative experiences. Interestingly enough, in this case, the notion of indeterminate identity begins from, yet is not limited to, a South African version of racial profiling. Therefore, the author’s interest in adaptable identities might be discussed apropos of skin color, but also in terms of oscillating between different geographical, cultural locations. In light of the above, a perspective accommodated here examines Wicomb’s thematization and confirmation of transitional experiences elaborated on a story of two females as becoming autonomous coloureds as well as mutable/unfixed/migrating characters. And, on top of that, this singular focus coincides with a broader pattern, filtered through the author’s aggregate account. As a person of South African descent, yet currently living in Europe, Wicomb acknowledges a specific adaptive domain, which in turn serves as a fitting backdrop for construing contemporary South African-ness from a more nuanced, in-between/cosmopolitan position.

In this essay on Zoë Wicomb’s “When the Train Comes” from the collection You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987), I read the short story as exemplary in its engagement at both the level of representation and the level of genre in the formation of the subjectivity of the central character, Frieda Shenton. The textual strategies and rhetorical tactics–which include delay, ellipsis, postponement and stoppage–fissure narrative discourse with its dependence on the conventions of time (story) and causality (plot) that ensures the smooth operation of a well-wrought fictional or literary text. The rupture of the traditional components of narrative curiously unconceals the originary moment of subject formation primarily based on Jacques Lacan’s concept of desire, the notion of the story as a unique and singular element, Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between the genre of the novella and the tale, and Judith Butler’s term “gender performance”.

The creative and critical work of the South African-born, Scottish-resident writer and public intellectual Zoë Wicomb (b. 1948) has spanned the sociocultural epochs we now label “transitional,” “post-transitional,” and perhaps even “post-post-transitional” in South African literary historiography. Her work has repeatedly explored collective political inheritances refracted through the consciousness of characters who are writers (or writers manqué), from Frieda in the linked stories of her debut, You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987), to the academic Mercia Murray in October (2014), via the unnamed narrator-amanuensis of David’s Story (2000) and several writercharacters in the stories collected in The One That Got Away (2008). Wicomb’s fictions repeatedly cast projects of writing as problematically complicit acts of witnessing that require readers to consider what is occluded from foundational narratives—whether these be racial or ethnic, parochial or cosmopolitan, or even anti-or decolonial. The author’s range of reference has always looked to the future and beyond the borders of South Africa, as much for the trajectories of her characters as for the intertextual allusions with which the works engage. Wicomb’s most recent novel, Still Life (2020), revisits many of these preoccupations, although predictably with a twist.

This article offers a close reading of Zoë Wicomb’s novel Playing in the Light (2006), arguing that the novel’s representation of racial passing, linguistic performance, and value present a radical departure from standard accounts of racial passing. In Wicomb’s novel, individual advancement and social mobility are central aspirations both to the “play-whites” in the novel as well as to the postapartheid author-figure. In this way Wicomb’s novel highlights not only the economic underpinnings of racial identity, but the continuation of racial exclusion in postapartheid South Africa. The novel provides an especially perceptive representation of racial capitalism in which the linguistic dominance of English, the development of neoliberalism, and continued hyper-exploitation produce a context in which social mobility is still dependent on passing.

Although Zoë Wicomb's four works of fiction deploy realist techniques, they show a deep and increasingly self-conscious interest in using the strategies of textualism, in which the real is seen to be grounded in discourse, materiality is inscribed in allegorising ciphers or signs, and the presented world has the status of textuality rather than being representational. Her short stories and novels address, adjust and re-imagine history - not simply by interrogating the intersecting discourses by means of which certain historical concepts are conventionally managed and understood but also by undoing the apparent opposition between history and text. These strategies constitute what is, in effect, a struggle over the sign. In the process, Wicomb's fiction moves in what may be called a double aesthetic and political direction. Her fiction yearns for a writing released from 'history' and 'meaning' and yet directed to truth-telling about varieties of subordination; it also yearns for a world in which human subjects - and language - can shake somewhat free of history and be born renewed, so that history in another sense can come fully alive.

This article offers a close reading of Zoë Wicomb's 2006 novel, Playing in the Light, arguing that it continues a project, evident throughout Wicomb's oeuvre, of exploring the ethics of narrative in the context of the legacies of colonial discursive formations, and of testing the responsibilities of fiction in the particular historical circumstances of post-apartheid South Africa. The essay argues that Wicomb's novel points to possibilities for narrative agency that actively plays host to the narratives of others. Using Jacques Derrida's suggestion that a consideration of the virtual archive, that which has been suppressed from the official record, is crucial to the post-apartheid nation, the article explores the idea of the archive both as space of engagement and as metaphor to explore apartheid experience and the construction of race.

Born in Namaqualand in the Western Cape in 1948, Zoë Wicomb is one of South Africa’s most accomplished and celebrated writers. With five published works of fiction, including two short story collections, and a body of critical scholarly essays to her name to date, she is an indisputable part of the South African English literary canon. Her fiction, which is typically taught in secondary and tertiary educational institutions and is the focus of considerable academic study, forms an intricate, if provocative, part of the South African literary landscape

This paper considers the place of English Literature as a university discipline in South Africa given the call to decolonise universities in the wake of Rhodes Must Fall. Focussing on historically black institutions (HBIs) and the apartheid government’s minimising of ‘aesthetic education’ (following Spivak’s use of the term) at them, I turn to Zoë Wicomb’s story “A Clearing in the Bush” (1987), which is set at the University of the Western Cape in the 1960s and concerns the attempts of an English literature student to complete an essay on Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’urbervilles. Wicomb’s story, I argue, invites us to think about the ambivalent role of English at HBIs and illustrates how literary study can act both as a particularly insidious vehicle for disciplinary power and, potentially, as a means for critiquing such power. Finally, the paper considers how Wicomb’s story remains pertinent today.

Bringing together Zoë Wicomb’s and Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” this essay argues that Benjamin’s concept of “constellating” events that are noncausally yet historically related to each other is uniquely able to help us grasp the specificity of Wicomb’s narrative experiment. That experiment aims at recovering the residues of female subjectivity repressed by the antiapartheid struggle, while also refusing to reincorporate women as “subjects” of homogeneous history. By explicitly naming and engaging the experiments of Joseph Conrad and James Joyce, Wicomb aligns her text with a formal inventiveness that (in her view) emphasizes the power of language to free us rather than (merely) entrap us. The author’s analysis thus both draws on and departs from Derek Attridge’s discussion of modernism in , suggesting that Benjamin’s radical, antihomogenizing historiography comes closer to what Wicomb values in Conrad and Joyce. Finally, the author shows how the novel offers a critique of the poststructuralist/postmodernist understanding of language as authorless and self-canceling, arguing that this view has, historically speaking, functioned to contain the threat of resistance and perpetuate dominant power relations.